Information Research Weblog

There seems to be a buzz going these days on the applications of faceted classification - it's a little curious that in the days of search engines and the wide belief that they can solve all retrieval problems (even if the IR researchers do not claim this) the 'information architecture' and 'knowledge management' fraternity should be turning to a method I first learnt about almost fifty years ago. I even sat at the feet of Shiyali Ramarita Ranganathan when he made his farewell tour of library schools in the UK. We had spent two days talking with him (conversation was his teaching method - he let you learn things, rather than trying to teach you) and by the time came for him to give a public address, he had lost his voice. It was a little curious to hear the whispered words of Ranganathan repeated in a strong Scottish accent by the then Head of Department! I still have the sheet of paper upon which he wrote the Five Laws of Library Science and then signed his name in English, Hindi, Sanskrit and, I think, Tamil. I went on to teach the subject for quite a few years - including following a number of well-known British teachers to the University of Maryland for a year because the Dean, Paul Wasserman, felt that there was more to classification than the schedules of the Dewey Decimal and Library of Congress classification schemes. The students in those years - between about 1965 and 1970 - were possibly the only ones in the USA getting that treatment.

Now the Weblogs buzz with the novelty of the ideas that Ranganathan first developed in his Colon Classfication of 1933 - yup, seventy years ago.

Links to chase down:

The Knowledge Management Connection - which is very keen to tell us that faceted classification is "Not just a library science technique", almost as though that would taint it.

Ranganathan for IAs

Faceted Movable Type

Ranganathan's rigorous analysis of the principles upon which all classification is based is contained in his 'Prolegomena to library classification' - but you can find a simplified version here:

A simplified model for facet analysis - I only put this one in because I get cited :-) (Only joking)

A tribute to SR Ranganathan, the father of Indian Library Science by Eugene Garfield - who also met SRR. See also Part II of the tribute.

Was Ranganathan a Yahoo!?

Ranganthan ahead of his century.

Ranganathan and Facet Analysis - an unlikely source, perhaps, but he is creeping in all over the place.

Here's something for those who are involved in, or about to be involved in, setting up a corporate intranet. The Intranet Road Map

Thanks to Column Two for that one.

Here's a nice item from the Column Two weblog:

I just had yum-cha to celebrate a cousin's birthday. The food was good, but much better were the discussions I had with my uncle, Noel Thompson. He has been working for many years in large organisations (such as BHP and James Hardie), and has been doing a lot of thinking about leadership, innovation and business processes.

He wrote down for me on a scrap of paper what he called the Three Laws of Nonsense, as follows:

• The source of nonsense is that for every piece of nonsense there exists an irrelevant frame of reference in which the item is sensible.
• The persistance of nonsense comes from rigorous arguments from inapplicable assumptions.
• The diffusion of nonsense results from the fact that people are more specialist than problems.


These are pretty amazing rules, and I think they have a huge relevance in the field of knowledge management at the moment. Since he didn't invent the rules, I'll have to go off and do some hunting around for the original reference...

The Gurteen Knowledge Letter is a useful pointer to things that are happening around the world, if only to remind us how sloppy is the use of the English language. An example is found in a link to Stakeholder interviews as simple knowledge mapping which includes questions such as:

• What information do you rely on during a normal working day?
• Where do you obtain this information from?
• If you have a question, where do you go to find an answer?
• Which sources of news do you regularly read?

Those seem like quite ordinary 'information needs' questions to me - and quite why a selection of staff in an organization should be called 'stakeholders' escapes me.

Euan Semple drew our attention on the IR-DISCUSS list to a Weblog from the Netherlands (maintained by Ton Zijlstra) which had an article on 'Monstrous KM', based on a PhD thesis by Martijntje Smits, 'technological philosopher', with the title "Exorcising monsters: the cultural domestication of new technologies". Ton's article is worth reading.

Now, Ton himself joins the debate, through a message to Euan, as follows:

I read with interest the exchange on what KM is in the IR-DISCUSS list-archives of last month. And my recent posting seems to fit in with what was said there. Also the comment by Sebastian Fiedler, who is focussing on educational questions and problems, will probably be meeting approval in your group:

Yes, there is a problem with using different vocabularies but I strongly believe that part of the "monstrousity of KM" is amplified by the conceptual mess and the lack of epistemological reflection that much of business oriented KM literature displays. Take an article of your choice and replace "knowledge" with "information" ... and you might get a glimpse of what is deeply bothering me. To borrow a line from Ivan Illich..."Some words become so flexible that they cease to be useful." This is what happened largely to the term "knowledge" from my point of view. And could it be that what Ton calls the "industrial command and control style" is still widely associated with the notion of "management"? No wonder that KM was born as a monster and that would only take food from the technocrats in many organizations...

I most certainly agree with Sebastian there. He precisely points to why the term KM is a misnomer, and its (to me absurd) implication that knowledge can actually be managed. The coiner of the term KM, Karl Wiig, who introduced it in 1986, now bitterly regrets having done so.

As to what KM is, and how to define it, to me the following points are relevant:

At the core of KM is a paradigmshift from taking the organisation and its structures as a starting point to taking the individual and his knowledge as a starting point. The most poignant difference probably being the question whether you view employees as costs, or as individuals with the knowledge that makes your business succesful, i.e. the source of all your revenue. Karl Sveiby is probably one of the best known consultancy names taking this approach

.

KM is not a discipline in its own right, it is multidisciplinary to the core, taking the point above as it's angle of approach. So in that sense there is nothing 'new' about KM, other then making assumptions about what to > do with the results from a host of disciplines. The learning organization of Senge indeed fits in rather well with that, and to me Senge's ideas are very important concepts.I would not say that KM is relabeling the Learning Organization. Senge's work is part of the evolution of KM-thinking in the past two decades.

IM HRM and other fields of M are not subsets of KM, but are the fields in a company that should be influenced by a KM approach.

I hope you don't mind me intruding on your group's deliberations, and would like to know a bit more about your backgrounds. The referrer logs of my web server seem to indicate a lot of .ac.uk addresses today.

I'm sure I speak for all on the list when I say that we certainly don't mind Ton coming into the debate, although the list has not been very actively recently - it only seems to boil up around the mention of 'km'! :-)

From a feature on http://www.llrx.com/

Knowledge management became a buzzword in law firms throughout the world in the 1990s. As firms learned how acquiring and leveraging knowledge effectively within client organizations contributed to their successes, many firms began to embrace KM with full force. But in the current weakened economy, law firms are cutting back on KM initiatives in order to control expenses. Despite the retreat from the knowledge management arena, many firms still recognize that KM is not just a passing trend -- it is an integral information-management tool for law firm operations now and in the future, according to a recent informal survey.

Mmmm. So km = im after all?

The author credit says: "Nina Platt is the director of library services at Faegre and Benson LLP in Minneapolis."

For some time I have been drawing attention in my quarterly Editorial to the papers with most hits. I only got round to putting counters on the papers in the first three volumes last December, so those papers have been recording hits for a shorter period of time than others. It made sense, therefore to present a list that takes this into account, so here we are. This is a list of the 'top ten' based on a ranking by 'hits per month' since a counter was attached.

Two interesting points emerge out of the exercise: first, as one might expect, the 'knowledge management' issue has an extremely well-hit set of papers, and secondly, apart from this, there are popular papers throughout the series, including one from volume 1 no. 1.

1.   The nonsense of knowledge management, by T.D. Wilson
Total hits 25.7.03 - 14790      Months counting - 9      Hits per month - 1643

2.   Web search: how the Web has changed information retrieval, by Terrence A. Brooks
Total hits 25.7.03 - 3757      Months counting - 3      Hits per month - 1252

3.   Understanding knowledge management and information management: the need for an empirical perspective, by France Bouthillier and Kathleen Shearer
Total hits 25.7.03 - 6020      Months counting - 9      Hits per month - 669

4.   The duality of knowledge, by Paul M. Hildreth and Chris Kimble
Total hits 25.7.03 - 5925      Months counting - 9      Hits per month - 658

5.   An action research approach to curriculum development, by P. Riding, S.P. Fowell, and P.C.M. Levy
Total hits 25.7.03 - 3461      Months counting - 7       Hits per month - 494

6.   Environmental scanning as information seeking and organizational learning, by Chun Wei Choo
Total hits 25.7.03 - 9399      Months counting - 21      Hits per month - 448

7.   Scanning The Business Environment For Information:A Grounded Theory Approach, Zita Correia and Tom Wilson
Total hits 25.7.03 - 2987      Months counting - 7      Hits per month - 427

8.   Student attitudes towards electronic information resources, by Kathryn Ray andJoan Day
Total hits 25.7.03 - 19714      Months counting - 54      Hits per month - 366

9.   Determining organizational information needs: the Critical Success Factors approach, by Maija-Leena Huotari and T.D. Wilson
Total hits 25.7.03 - 9232      Months counting - 27      Hits per month - 342

10.   Knowledge management: another management fad?, Leonard J. Ponzi and Michael Koenig
Total hits 25.7.03 - 3071      Months counting - 9      Hits per month - 341

Last week's issue of New Scientist (I've only just got round to reading it) drew my attention to a 'bull' eradicator from Deloitte Consulting. It's a Word add-in that will assess the bullshit rating of your prose. I haven't tried it yet, but the account made it seem promising.

My e-mail brought me a message that put me in touch with an interesting resource available at The Chalfont Project - a management consultancy outfit. On the site are some articles on various aspects of management by Dr. Leandro Herrero - readers of the pharmaceutical industry magazine SCRIP will recognize the name. I can recommend all of them as a 'good read', but readers of this Weblog may be particularly interested in Victor's leaving and his IQ goes with him

Ah well - midnight! That's enough for tonight.

En route from Sweden yesterday I picked up the FT and discovered an interesting article on management fads.

The story is summed up in the first para:

Don't look now, but the zeitgeist has changed. While the last two decades of the 20th century produced wave after wave of new management ideas - total quality management, business process re-engineering, knowledge management, e-commerce - the first few years of the new millennium have been, for want of a better word, fadless.

Interestingly, knowledge management figures not at all in the piece, apart from that mention, but it clearly fits Abrahamson's notion that a fad is associated with "emotionally charged, enthusiastic and unreasoned discourse" :-)

The paper points out that the consultancy companies are suffering currently after growing at a compound rate of 20% throughout the 80s and 90s, so perhaps km has not been the big life-safer they hoped for - signalled by its disappearance from some of their Web sites.

A worthwhile read.

The virus continues to spread and, of course, it had to happen - Weblogs are now pronounced 'knowledge management tools'.

Read all about it and try to refrain from laughing aloud.

As I understand it, Weblogs are simply compilations of messages, which have an intention to inform others, or the world at large, about matters that interest the writer. Many of the Weblog messages are simply referrals to other Weblogs or Web sites and the Weblog author may have no 'knowledge' whatsoever about the matter under discussion - s/he may simply think, this looks like an interesting site or item, I'll pass it on.

Other kinds of sites created by using Weblog software are, arguably, not Weblogs under this definition, but something else - online procedure manuals, for example. The fact that one suggestion is labelled,"The Weblog as a filing cabinet", rather makes the point.

Just found on the Web site of 'Knowledge, technology and policy' - this is their "mission":

"The Editorial Board of Knowledge, Technology & Policy is receptive to articles resting on the titular tripod. "Knowledge" means how technologies change the ways we think. Knowledge also refers to how we organize, access and use information--indeed, how we transform information into knowledge. "Policy" refers to what we should do about these things (if anything) as individuals, communities and governments."

Back to Alice through the Looking Glass?

Tom

A recent message on IR-DISCUSS mentioned the new Interim Standard on Knowledge Management from Standards Australia. By chance, I discovered that an extract from the standard is available on the Web.

This information came from the Column Two Weblog written by James Robertson. James maintains a list of such standards, which members of IR-DISCUSS and readers of the IR Weblog may find of interest.

The language of these things is truly bizarre - all resulting from an inability to distinguish effectively between 'knowledge' and 'information' and as a result of accepting Nonatka's flawed definition of 'tacit knowledge'. The fact that national standards bodies have been so infiltrated by the consultancies (BSI's standard was written, in effect, by Price Waterhouse) ought to give citizens cause for concern.

Consider, for example, this set of definitions:

1.2.1 Data

Any manifestation in the environment, including symbolic representations, that in combination may form the basis of information.

1.2.2 Information

Data in a context to which meaning has been attributed.

1.2.3 Knowledge

A body of understanding and skills that is constructed by people. Knowledge is increased through interaction with information (typically from other people).

1.2.4 Knowledge management

A multi-disciplined approach to achieving organisational objectives by making best use of knowledge. It involves the design, review and implementation of both social and technological processes to improve the application of knowledge, in the collective interest of stakeholders.

Have you stopped screaming yet?

I'm off to Loughborough tomorrow to talk about 'knowledge management' - again. The one thing I get out of these events is the fact that people want to believe in km - but when asked to distinguish between 'knowledge' and 'information', fail to do so. I wonder if tomorrow will bring something new?

A good deal of the knowledge management literature actually deals with communication in organizations and it is welcome to see an item on ZDNet that deals with this in terms of communication rather than in terms of km. Collaboration: Real time, real value?, by Dan Farber, deals mainly with instant messaging, which is now available in a variety of forms for use within business, rather than across the Internet. There's also an interview with Simon Hayward of the consulancy group, Gartner, which, sad to say reveals virtually total ignorance of the way people work in offices. He tells us, for example, that a message will be 'less intrusive' than a 'phone call - exactly how is not made clear. We're also advised that messaging will increase trust! I would have thought that without trust in the first place you can't get going with messaging.

Fortunately the readers of ZDNet appear to be very well aware of the problems and limitations of the technology. For example, one correspondent on the Feedback notes something of interest against the IT hype:

I’ve worked in places that use both Outlook and Notes and at least 95% of the people used them exclusively for email. The other 5% used the calendar features occasionally. That’s a lot in licensing fees for something that could be substituted for free. It leads you to believe that before free/open source will succeed on cost alone, the decision makers have to lose their emotional attachment with some of these apps. I’ve even seen certain processes made compulsory using features in these suites, for no apparent reason other than to justify the purchase.

And another observes a core problem:

The last thing I need is more real-time interrupts during the day. As it is, my productivity is down almost half because I can't complete even a simple task before someone phones, drops by, or otherwise demands my attention. Once they're taken care of, it takes several minutes to get back into the context of what I was doing again, at which point the next interruption occurs.

and another:

Attempting to replace face to face meetings with IM is nothing but a marketing attempt by those very companies to sell more software. I don't NEED MORE INTERRUPTIONS during the day than I already get from phone and email while working.

and another:

The problem with most modern forms of communication is that you can't tell if the other person is busy. As already pointed out the business day has too many interuptions in it to begin with.

Finally, it is interesting that several of the ideas discussed here were actually incorporated into trial systems in 1985 when I was investigating the Department of Trade and Industry's 'office automation' pilots. Things don't always move rapidly in IT :-) And, you know, it might be a good idea for the vendors of these systems to check on the outcomes of those pilots - I imagine that the reason that such a time has passed before some elements reached the market is that it was found that no one wanted them!

I managed to finish off Fuller's book on the Amsterdam trip. As Elena Maceviciute said in her review in Information Research, it is an interesting work. However, its subject is not related to the current 'knowledge management' fad, but to science and science research policy and the role of universities in public policy on science research. It also takes a position on the role of scientific publication and the various alternatives that exist in a world of electronic publishing. Peer review comes in for critical comment, as does Stephen Harnad's espousal of 'e-prints' as a way of ensuring readier and open access to the scholarly literature. Fuller also pays attention to the rise of expert systems, but here his treatment is very similar to that for 'knowledge management', to which I drew attention in the earlier message. That is, he gives very little support for the statements he makes about expert systems and, at times, he is simply wrong about them - for example, he claims:

Thus, although knowledge engineers have amassed a record of designing expert systems in medicine and psychiatry just as reditable as in librarianship and engineering, computerization has made greater inroads in the latter pair of weak professional fields.

He cites a 1987 reference in support of this, but I know of no expert systems in librarianship that have made any lasting impact on the field - although attention has been devoted to the possibility, especially in relation to cataloguing. Generally, in relation to expert systems, Fuller does not give supporting references or examples - another straw man built up to support a rather weak case.

All very interesting, but the newly appointed 'knowledge manager' in industry reaching for this book to discover what he is supposed to be doing is going to be disappointed.

The graph showing the growth of the literature on knowledge management has been updated slightly by confirming that there were 145 papers with this term in the title in 2002 - that is three more than the estimate given in November, which is a pretty good error rate :-)

Prompted by Elena Maceviciute's review in Information Research, I've been reading Steve Fuller's 'Knowledge management foundations'. Anyone coming to this book expecting to find some basic guidance on how to be a knowledge manager would certainly be disappointed. In fact, Fuller is a proponent of the idea of 'social epistemology' and this volume is one of a series that deal with the nature of science and scientific research as social phenomena within a social epistemology framework.

Interestingly, the term 'social epistemology' appears to have been coined by Margaret Egan and used by Shera and Egan in a paper in Library Quarterly in 1952. One is struck by the fact that the knowledge management literature - however the term is defined - appears to completely ignore the fact that librarians and information scientists have been wrestling with the underlying concepts for a great deal longer than the information systems and computer science communities. The re-invention of techniques under different headings - classification becomes ontologies, descriptive cataloguing and indexing become metatags, and so on - is a feature of this exclusion of the LIS literature from consideration in this sphere.

However, back to Fuller: like many other authors he fails to define exactly what he means by 'knowledge management' - his book is actually about the organization of scientific research and research and development in business organizations, although he also devotes attention to the nature of academic research and the role of the university in modern society. A section in the first chapter is headed 'Knowledge and information: the great bait and switch' and the first paragraph is worth quoting:

"Knowledge" and "information" have virtually had to reverse meanings to arrive at knowledge management's baseline assumptions. This transformation has removed much of the contemplative and even ethereal quality of classical philosophical conceptions of knowledge, thereby contributing to the incisive and critical spirit of knowledge managers. But at the same time, it has introduced a coarseness into the handling of its putative object, knowledge, often by reducing it to information. This should raise the alarm for those interested in the future of organized inquiry.

Indeed! Mind you - I'm not sure where he finds the 'incisive and critical spirit' because we have a phenomenon which is occasionally found in academic writing, although every academic would deplore it in a student :-) That is, the erection of a kind of 'straw king' (rather than a mere straw man} of knowledge management where opinions, positions, critical perceptions, etc. are attributed to 'knowledge management' or 'knowledge managers', but without any attribution to sources in the literature. Everything else is referenced, but citations are generally lacking for the points of view attributed to 'knowledge management'.

So - I'm reading this in a wary fashion and I'm just over half-way through. When I make it to the end I'll post my verdict.

Tom